So Much Work, So Little Time for Engineers

Given all the new tools and technology that promise to significantly boost productivity, why do so many engineers consistently rank "not enough time and resources" as one of their top challenges?

None of us, or course, is going to admit to watching cat videos or playing Tetris at work. But are engineers really as crazy-busy as they claim to be? And if they are, what's going on?

Those are questions that three engineering managers explored during a session at the Test Leadership Forum at NI Week 2014, organized by Bill Driver, a marketing manager at National Instruments. We also spoke with a few non-manager engineers to get their take on the issue.

Source: UBM Tech "Mind of the Engineer" Study, 2013

"Are engineers more productive today? I would have to say that they are, but at the same time we keep giving them more to do," said Ken Shephard. He's director of test engineering at Northrup Grumman, where he oversees a department of 160 engineers. "I think more is asked of engineers today vs. 25 years ago, but I don't think it's unique to engineers. Americans work more hours than anyone else on the planet."

That sentiment was echoed by Dale Foster, an engineering services manager at Boston Scientific, who oversees the electrical, mechanical, and software labs that support all design and testing of medical devices. "The claim is real -- engineers are busier than ever, but it's management's job to set the priorities and fight for more resources," Foster stressed.

"There's no doubt that engineers are much more productive these days. If you were to measure it by 'transistor count' or in the case of a software engineer 'lines of code,' a task that took six engineers 20 years ago to do can easily be done by one engineer today," said Edison Fong. He's an analog engineer who spent most of his career in big corporations and now does consulting. It was a career change brought about, not by choice, but rather by declining demand for the kind of analog design work he does.

Given the corporate trend toward "right-sizing" and the increasing focus on profitability, it's tempting to conclude that there are simply not enough engineers to do the work. And while engineering departments are decidedly leaner than in the past, the story is more complicated than that.

Thanks to the Internet, an engineer's job is now 24/7. "In the old days, we had more idle time," said Fong told us. "Not anymore. With Asia and Europe online, teams are working around the clock. I passed by Apple Headquarters in Cupertino the other evening. It was 9:30 p.m., and the parking lot was over 50% full. This would have never happened pre-Internet."

For David Ashton, a telecom specialist in charge of keeping a large communications network going, time always seems to be in short supply. In particular, he said, there is ever less of it for the kind of housekeeping tasks that, while not directly productive work, do impact productivity.

He believes a key issue is that managers are much more involved today -- and not in a good way. "In the past my team had almost total autonomy to design and implement our communications network as we saw fit. We had the expertise and also a good understanding of what the customer (in this case the rest of the organization) needed," recalled Ashton. "But these days more and more of the design decisions, actually any decisions, tend to be taken further up the chain by managers who don't have the expertise to get the best real-world solutions."

Illustrating why Scott Adams will never run out of ideas for the Dilbert cartoon, Ashton cited example after example of situations in which actions by management resulted in more work, more cost, and more time pressures for the engineering team.

"This is kind of a silly example, but awhile ago managers decided our storage area needed 'cleaning up.' They came and, without even checking with us, chucked out a lot of current spare equipment along with some old, redundant stuff. Against orders, I retrieved most of the current stuff, which saved us a huge amount of work later when we needed the spares."

As multi-tasking expands, the associated inefficiencies become more burdensome. Time accounting when working on multiple projects becomes an increasing burden as does reporting progress to multiple managers and the associated meetings overhead. Finally, managing the computers adds to the burden: when a computer demands 20 minutes to install a critical software update or shutdown, productivity suffers.

All the new ways to communicate (Skype, Fbook, Twitter, Chat..oh and email) have afforded us new ways to talk to anyone, anytime and create new virtual communities, but they have also created a time sink.

When I first got on Facebook a colleague said "Welcome and say goodbye to anoither 45 minutes a day!"

I think attending client calls (unless you are in a core company like IBM Research, Microsoft Research, Google etc) is what gobbles up most of the time of engineers. I've heard such junior engineers spending their time playing games on the office PlayStation, and they couldn't go home because the client calls would have come at any time. So they were made to sit all through the day.

"The claim is real -- engineers are busier than ever, but it's management's job to set the priorities and fight for more resources," Foster stressed."

Managing work hours is crucial if you want your engineers to stay focused and competitive. Most engineers fail to do this, and thus it is the managers job to force them into a fixed regime that includes adequate rest and excercise.

how many really tough problems do you solve when you are not staring at them but instead you are doing something completely separate, like walking, reading a book, even sleeping?

We've all come up with ideas when we're not staring at our work, but how much of our time is spent on "busy" work, the kind that has to be done but is monotonous, requiring no thought? We often need to longer hours just to do that.

There are just people out there that shouldn't be managers. Actually, let me rephrase. There are managers out that that us as engineers shouldn't take crap from and bother working for. I've learned enough that life's too short to be involved in bad work.

Scenario #1 - you're employed and have been looking elsewhere. The manager interested in having an interview should never call the person out of the blue if that person has an email address in the resume. If the manager is asking for basic things that are already in the resume, he has not taken the time to review it. This is a job you should not waste time persuing because that would be an idiot you'll need to deal with - unless you're out of work and need the money

Scenario #2 - Manager should be looking out for his/her team members. If you're in a meeting with other teams where the other team is reporting a problem with the project, don't start immediately putting blame at your own guys in front of other people without fully understanding the situation.

Scenario #3 - There are managers that solely care about numbers and bookings. They're pure sales weasels, not there to manage. Well, I guess 'manage' would be the appropriate term, since they're not there to 'lead'. In any case, they are ones that are so disconnected with technology, people that work for them, completely disregards effots that their team puts in, show no remorse when people from his team leaves. They're so high up in the food chain that they're most interested is how much commission they get from bookings.